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Hubble Too Sharp? Quantum Theory Flaws?
sckienle writes "Space.com has an article suggesting that the Hubble space telescope's pictures are too sharp. At least they are based on current interpretations of quantum theory. When viewing distant objects, 'the expected quantum effect is like a subtle version of the blurring caused by Earth's atmosphere, which makes stars twinkle.' But those effects do not seem to be present. The research will be published April 10 in the journal Astrophysical Research-Letters."
This is a bad thing because?
Applying relativity to the cosmos at large requires us to come up with exotic explanations for the "dark matter" problem. So far quantum mechanics had the luxury of not having such a problem. It is nice to know it has finally acuired one. It makes things more fair, somehow :-)
:-)
What I'd love to see is someone showing that the effect on light over long distances was not to blur it, but rather to shift it to the red. Now *that* would really make a "big bang" out of our theories
First too blurry, now too sharp.
Some people...
The problems with quantum theory seem to have come with some of the proposed properties of a merger with general relativity. In other words, this isn't going to affect non-relativistic quantum mechanics or even QED, except insofar as those theories are already incomplete or incorrect. Briefly, the scientists looked at Hubble photographs for signs of the quantization of space and time expected by many working on general relativity/quantum theory mergers, and didn't find any evidence of it. Interesting, if true, but not earth-shattering yet.
Don't be cruel, some parts of the light have special needs.
If you are interested in actually reading the papers, they can be found on the arXiv.org e-Print archive, and directly here and here. I would suggest the first article - the math doesn't look so hairy.
they checked with the Hubble folks to make sure that they hadn't applied some sort of (pseudo)sharpening techniques along with all the other processing (like false-coloring, et al) that they do. The article didn't say that they analyzed raw data.
Sigs are bad for your health.
No kidding. My first reservation was reading about how the article "will be published." One of the things to always be leery of is research that is released to the media before published. And they've talked to massive numbers of pseudo-scientific journalists and websites. Second, it's being published in a "letters" journal. Not the highest standards, because they're not publishing a full article. Third, these claims are being put out by groups from places like the University of Alabama at Huntsville. I'm not saying great research CAN'T be done at such places...but combined with the way they've gone about publishing, it smacks of someone trying to drum up their own PR.
Now, as for the actual claims in the article, they're talking about how blurred these pictures should be, with reference to the Planck time, and invoked a quantum gravity argument. The existence of a quantum gravity has never been proven rigorously, and has been a bane to the efforts of unifying the four major forces for years. So, if anything, they've managed to poke holes in a theory that everyone admits is thoroughly "under construction."
The next problem is that the entire fundamental point of their study assumes that uncertainties in time propogate over distance, and that the uncertainty in wavelength can be interpreted as a superposition of waves of complete certainty. This is a sketchy and controversial means of implementing this. Had they stopped before they got here, and said that their results imply that maybe this big assumption is dead wrong, they would have made a significant contribution.
However, they don't stop there. They then go on to discuss potential implications including an infinitely dense universe at the time of the big bang, which assumes that both their results as well as the flawed theories they invoke are correct, but that the collected works on theoretical physics are wrong. It's happened before, but not usually. It's a massive reach, but they include it because doing so is likely to get them more exposure than their more legitimate claims. And have no doubt, this will gather much more attention in the "Scientific American" crowd of science-groupies than it will in academia.
My problem with this isn't that they didn't do a cool experiment - they did. The problem is that they extended its impact far too wide. When confronted with their evidence that invalidates one of two theories, they choose to interpret it as invalidating the more established theory, as that gets them more press. Their research was fine on its own, but it seems they are more interested in publicity. Reminds me of a group in Utah about 15 years ago...
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat